WHEN MENTAL ILLNESS AND RACISM INTERSECT
One wonders how much mental illness is behind recent high-profile racebased incidents in Metro Vancouver and beyond.
Facebook went viral this year when a Burnaby woman, Anika Vassell, posted a smartphone video of an elderly white woman with a German accent telling her: “I see that you are black and you’re not like the rest of us.” But when journalists followed up and talked to the woman’s son, Christian Chiribelea, he said his mother was schizophrenic.
When an out-of-control man on Vancouver’s SkyTrain harangued 18-year-old Noor Fadel, who was wearing a hijab, saying in Arabic and English he was going to “kill all Muslims,” she received social-media support from around the world. Police soon revealed the assailant, whose face Fadel posted on her Facebook page, was homeless and “known to police,” indicating he was not of sound mind. Fadel’s brother, Abdul, was eventually quoted saying it seemed the man was “mentally ill.”
The latest phone-made video to go viral captured the bizarre moment when an ethnic Chinese man kicked a white librarian in the stomach in Richmond. The librarian was wearing a pink “Stop Bullying ” T-shirt during an event in which many Richmond residents, predominantly Chinese, were heatedly denouncing a proposal to build a homeless shelter. Speculation initially abounded about how racism could be a factor in the man’s attack, but Richmond police were unusually tight-lipped.
Although the mainstream psychiatric community in North America has so far had its reasons for not declaring extreme racism a form of mental illness, that is not the case in parts of Europe, where the respected Oxford Handbook of Personality Disorders has categorized severe racism as “pathological bias,” defining it as “supremacist views that could lead one to commit acts of violence.”
Harvard psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint, who is AfricanAmerican, has also been petitioning the American Psychological Association to include racism in the DSM, the manual containing all official psychiatric conditions. “Like all others who experience delusions, extreme racists do not think rationally,” Poussaint says, adding that some extreme racists have schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Their racism disappears, he says, when they understand their mental dysfunction.
And what are we to make of many mass murders in the U.S.? In 2015, white supremacist Dylann Roof gunned down nine parishioners at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina. Psychiatrists found he had mental disorders. In 2015 Muslim Omar Mateen, an Afghan-American, killed 49 people inside a gay nightclub in Florida. His relatives said he was bipolar.
Forensic psychiatrist Michael Stone studied 235 mass murder cases and found that 22 per cent of the perpetrators suffered from clinical mental illness. Many of the rest were malevolent narcissists or had paranoid personality disorder. Most wrestled with “murderous rage, utter hopelessness, and suicidal despair.”
While some psychotherapists worry that declaring intense racism to be a mental illness could reduce individuals’ sense of personal responsibility, others, like the University of Illinois’s Carl Bell, maintain there is little doubt at least part of the inclination to target a minority with hatred comes from some kind of personality disorder, often paranoia. It should go without saying that mass murderers must be punished and racist assaults and harassment can be traumatizing. But the three recent incidents in Metro Vancouver suggest holding a stigma against people of colour is not entirely dissimilar from harbouring a stigma against those with mental illness. Western society agrees it is immoral to target people based on their ethnicity or sexual orientation, but we still often marginalize people because of their diminished, admittedly sometimes disturbing, mental conditions.
These three incidents also raise questions about the actual extent of racism. What does it mean when many, if not most, acts of egregious racism — the kind that go wild as video on Twitter and Facebook and often attract international news reports — are rooted in some form of mental imbalance?
Shocking-looking incidents captured on smartphone videos are among of the reasons many people say racism is spreading these days, according to police.
Another reason for some people’s perception of rising racism comes from the other end of the severity spectrum. It revolves around how the definition of racism has been stretched recently by a cohort of academics and others who are advancing the dangers of “unconscious racism.”
Some activists have embraced these academic theories to condemn, for instance, the momentary feeling a person has when realizing an “other” person is, at one level, different, on the basis of colour (or sex or economic status). They argue this is an act of racism (or bigotry), even when that person never actively discriminates against another, which is the classic definition.
With so much grey area these days about what is and isn’t racism, it seems there would be better ways to handle possibly racist incidents than to highlight them without context. No wonder there were tempestuous responses when Facebook posts were put up by Burnaby’s Vassell, an anti-racism advocate, and Noor, who had earlier organized a protest outside Vancouver’s Trump Tower. It took police and journalists to provide a fuller story.
To be sure, these cases are not easy to navigate, as police have discovered. Richmond RCMP is officially adding almost no context to the assault last month on the librarian, which initially led many jolted people on social media to believe there was a racial component. Although RCMP tersely indicated that’s not the case, police have failed to release any other information, including a name, let alone a suggestion of charges.
In such highly publicized and socially volatile cases, Joseph Saulnier, Vancouver chair of the criminal subsection of the Canadian Bar Association, says the police generally “owe the public an explanation, so people can have confidence in the justice system.”
In 99 per cent of assaults similar to the one launched against the librarian, Saulnier said charges would normally be laid, regardless of whether the assailant was mentally ill or of extremely low IQ. Emphasizing he did not know the details, Saulnier wondered if the RCMP, in consultation with the librarian, has adopted a reconciliation approach, which he would applaud.
It is clearly difficult for officials, and the public, to effectively respond to the immense complexities that arise when mental illness overlaps with law enforcement, as it often does.
But it’s also clear there is frequently a direct relationship between acute acts of racism and acute cases of personality disorder. It would help us all to be more aware of how often they intersect.
Rather than prosecuting the doctors who try to help these patients, shouldn’t the province and the Health Ministry focus on providing access to this much-needed surgery? The focus should be on access to care within our publicly funded system. Dr. Alastair Younger There is frequently a direct relationship between acute acts of racism and acute cases of personality disorder. DOUGLAS TODD